Living, Eating and Learning: Children’s Experiences of Change and Life in a Refugee Camp
View/ Open
Date
2007Author
Atkinson, Lucy C
Metadata
Abstract
This is a study about children living in an unusual setting, a refugee camp. It
recognizes that this situation causes disruption to children’s lives but rather than
focusing exclusively on this disruption, emphasizes the children’s everyday
experiences of continuity and change as interpreted through their position as social
actors.
The study is based on 2 years of fieldwork conducted in Kala refugee camp in
Zambia using participatory and child-centred research techniques. It studies the
children’s everyday lives in order to gain a picture of continuity and change, and in
particular, how these are experienced by the children. Going to school, working and
playing remain central to children’s lives but these are experienced differently in the
camp. By locating children as agents within their social context, this study considers
the wider impact of the camp setting on children’s experience of growing up.
Children’s preoccupations reflect those of the social group but include a unique child
perspective on these issues. Dependency on NGO provision of food is a key defining
characteristic of their refugee experience. The impact of this reaches beyond
provision of nutrition due to the importance of food in economic and social
transactions, as a means of defining social relations and its symbolic role in everyday
conversation. These combine to provide a forum for the negotiation of power
relations between refugees and with the NGOs.
The study concludes that changes to lifestyle affect the way that children grow up and
therefore have an impact on their ideas of identity and what is acceptable or desirable
behaviour. Adults, who aim to ‘socialise’ children into appropriate behaviour, affect
this, but ultimately children are active in authoring their own experiences, drawing
influences from every aspect of their environment.